Title: Of Reticence and Rumination
Author: Forensiphile (Zenbridge at YTDAW)
Rating: E for Everyone!
This story was written for the YTDAWonFB Fanfic Challenge.
The elements:
The dialogue phrase "…an oasis in the middle of a wasteland."
Carpe Diem
Bruises
Dripping hair
Hallucination
Notes: Wow. It's been about eight years since I've written fic. I'm incredibly rusty. I'm not really sure what this story is, to be honest. I'm a devoted Grissom/Sara fan who was somewhat fascinated by the DB and Sara scenes in Bittersweet and Dune and Gloom. I've had a fic nugget in my head for a long time about a third-party view of the events of Sara's more recent past and so this vignette was born. I hope you enjoy it.
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"We're looking at five deaths. Similar scenes, almost identical M.O., motiveless, or at least apparently so."
"You're thinking we're looking at a serial killer." Sara spoke directly, more a statement than a question.
D.B. and Sara sat in his office, the unnatural lighting as well as fatigue casting a pall on their faces. The shift was over, but neither seemed ready to put an end to a frustrating day.
"Don't you?" DB asked. He cocked an eyebrow at the younger CSI. All day Sara had seemed to play Sergeant Skeptical to his Captain Obvious. It was throwing him for a loop.
"Murders spread out over five years? Bodies dumped in the desert. All GSWs. There is a lot of desert and there are a lot of guns."
D.B. lifted his hands. "All shot in the head."
"If you wanted to make sure someone was dead, where would you shoot them?" Sara's voice was light, but there was an edge underneath. He had learned to recognize that edge. He redirected.
"Okay, let's say they're not related. There were no signs of other trauma. At least three of the vics were dumped with their wallets. Cash, credit cards, IDs. Two had gold jewelry, untouched. Robbery wasn't a motive. What was?"
"Disputes? For sport? The absence of motive isn't necessarily an indicator of serial murder , no more than hair color would be. Serial killers just aren't that common. I've been a CSI thirteen years and I've seen a few. They're usually more careful, more deliberate. They're detail-oriented. It's not usually luck or carpe diem. They don't go for quick kill and leave their victims three feet from a road."
"At least not in your case."
Sara stiffened, but didn't look away. "I'm not personalizing this."
"That's not what I meant." D.B. paused a beat. "How do you cope with something like that?"
Shifting her gaze a bit, she shrugged. "I don't really talk about it."
He wasn't sure if that was a rebuke or an honest answer to his question. "What about your husband?"
"It tends to drag down a dinner conversation and it's an awkward subject for Skype." Sara's smile was forced and he could see the tension in her shoulders.
D.B. wanted to stop himself, but he felt like he was close to peeling back a layer of the very intelligent, very complex onion that was Sara Sidle. "Do you ever think about it?"
Sighing, Sara seemed to resign herself to the conversation. "Sometimes. I find myself thinking about it less and less. It's just the little things. I get notifications from VINE whenever her custody status changes. Sometimes my arm aches a bit on a rainy day. Occasionally, a really hot day can bring back memories. One night, I took a shower and my wet hair dripping on my face sent me into a panic attack. I thought I was drowning."
"That must be scary."
Sara shifted in her seat. He noticed her knee was bouncing lightly. "It can be."
"Did you ever see a counselor?"
She rolled her eyes. "I tried. Grissom made me. He even went with me. I didn't find it…productive. I think Grissom thought I felt like I was smarter than the therapist, but I needed more than the suggestion I distract myself with gossip blogs and spa days. "
"What did you find productive?" D.B. asked. He knew he was taking a chance.
Sighing, Sara pinned his eyes with hers. All at once, he saw why Gil Grissom never had a chance. "Why the sudden interest in something that happened five years ago?"
"I like to know about the people I work with. Nick I had pegged the first day. Catherine put it out there to know. You are an enigma to me. An enigma married to someone, by all reports, who is also an enigma. You're intelligent. A great investigator. You have an interesting history. Some I can relate to, some…" He gestured to the air around them, "...I cannot. I'm just taking your temperature."
Sara lifted an eyebrow, but bit back a smile. " Fine. It was a bad day. A psychopath tasered me, stuffed me into a trunk, and pinned me under a car. I had to break my own arm to get out, but I would have gnawed it off if that hadn't worked. I stumbled around for the better part of a day. I felt like I was on fire. Everything hurt. I never knew that thirst could be painful. I actually threw up several times before my body stopped trying. At one point I started having hallucinations. " She paused. "You know how in cartoons they usually hallucinate good things? Like an oasis in the middle of a barren wasteland?"
D.B. nodded, not wanting to risk saying anything that might shatter the moment.
"Well, my hallucinations weren't like that. In mine, Natalie kept coming back. I felt like she was chasing me through that desert. I must have walked for twelve hours before I decided dying wouldn't be the worst thing I could do that day. Fortunately, Nick found me before it was too late."
He ran a hand through his hair. "How long were you in the hospital?"
"About five days. They were concerned about infection more than anything else. There is a lot of bacteria in sand, and in runoff."
"Did you have support after it?"
"I had a lot of visitors. Greg spent so much time in my room I thought Gil was going to fake my death to get away from him." Sara laughed softly at the memory.
D.B. smiled. "And…he was there for you?" He didn't know how to refer to Gil Grissom in context.
"Grissom?"
Noted.
"Yeah, he was there from the moment I regained consciousness until the day I forced him to go back to work."
"That must have been nice." D.B. said, blandly.
"It was essentially the end of our working relationship, though." Sara said with a wistful expression.
"Escandaloso."
She smiled ruefully. "Yeah, there was no hiding it after that."
"That's too bad."
"It was actually a mixed bag. We couldn't work together, but we could go to restaurants. Walk down the Strip. We had lived in a bubble for the better part of two years."
There was an unsettled pause. He could tell Sara was retreating in that moment, so he decided to return to his objective.
"Have you ever spoken to Natalie Davis again?"
"No." Her voice was firm, without emotion.
"Did you see her at the trial?"
"I didn't attend the trial. I testified via video deposition in the conference room of a Hilton."
"Do you think speaking to her would provide closure?"
Sara appeared to contemplate the question before shaking her head. "I don't think there's anything she could say that would take away the nightmares, or the cold sweats. She wasn't rational. I don't feel the need to try to understand her. I don't hate her. I think of her and feel nothing. I have reactions to physical reminders of the trauma. Otherwise, I've made the decision to move past it."
"Just like that?" D.B. snapped his fingers.
"Natalie Davis was not the worst thing to ever happen to me."
He bit his lip and nodded. That was a conversation for another day.
"The hardest part… " Sara started and D.B. looked up, surprised. "…was after the fact. I could tell Grissom was worried about me, so I wouldn't say much. After he'd go to bed, I'd get on the computer. There was a fair amount of coverage in the media. Law enforcement, weird crime, all that. I'd be interested. Anyway, I'd read the articles and feel like it was someone else's life. It was my photo on the page and I couldn't wrap my head around it."
"I'd read the comments and 90% of them would call me lucky. It was all about the outcome. It was the same thing when I came back to work. I was treated like a hero because I was found alive. In reality, I made a lot of dumb decisions that night and I should have been dead long before Nick got there." Sara's breathing was rapid and she was speaking with an intensity D.B. hadn't seen before. He wondered if his lack of history with the team was providing her an outlet she never had before.
"You know what kept me going? I didn't want them to find me like we find our victims. Cold, blue, bruised, glassy-eyed. I couldn't bear the thought of Greg tripping over my corpse or Gil getting there too late. Isn't that awful?" Her voice sounded a little ragged now. "If not for the image of me splayed out on Doc Robbins' table, I probably wouldn't be here."
D.B. pinched the bridge of his nose and affected a brighter look. "I think maybe they bring in a guest coroner for that kind of thing."
Sara's laugh was a bit watery. "I really wasn't thinking all that clearly."
"Here's how I see it, Sara: You got yourself out from under a two-ton car and snapped your own arm to do it. You had the good sense to take a mirror with you, leave a trail for the people you know would move Heaven and Earth to find you, and you kept going when most people would have died back under that Corvette. You would be here, Sara, because you deserve to be."
Sara held his gaze and smiled. Then, embarrassed, she looked down. "Sorry. I usually try to avoid these conversations."
"Thanks for being open with me. When I first came here, I used Catherine as a resource. She told me you were a workaholic. That you sometimes get too invested in cases. Some about you and…Grissom. It was a picture taken with a pretty wide lens, but it was a picture.
So, I did some digging. I read the files. I read the articles. It was horrifying and I couldn't imagine how you weren't somehow shaped by that. Yet no one talked about it."
"Well, by the time you got here it was pretty ancient history."
"Maybe." A few moments passed and neither seemed sure how to end the conversation. D.B. decided to lighten the mood.
"You're flying out next week, aren't you?"
"If my boss approves my leave request, yes."
"Approved." Grabbing the form out of his inbox, he searched under a pile of folders for his pen. "Where are you two going?"
"It's in Peru. Cusco. The Inkaterra Canopy Treehouse. It's right on the Southeastern edge of the Amazon. You stay ninety feet up in the air. It looks amazing from what I've seen online. I've never been to Peru. South America at all, really. Costa Rica was the closest."
D.B. nodded. "I've been to Costa Rica. Buddy of mine runs a surf camp down there."
"You surf?" Sara asked, eyebrow raised.
"Nah, I nearly drowned on the first attempt. I spent the rest of the time drinking and working on my farmer's tan."
"Ah."
He glanced toward her left hand, which was fiddling with her mug. "That's where you made it official, right?"
"Yeah, " She smiled, twisting her ring reflexively. "That was a good day." She looked down, and the room was quiet again.
D.B. had known she was the best investigator on his team. Brilliant, focused, empathetic almost to a fault. Tonight he was seeing a different side—sensitive, strong, and maybe a bit self-conscious.
"He's a lucky man, you know that?"
She looked up and grinned, showing teeth for the first time that night. It was beautiful.
"I tell him that every day."
FIN